Was at the casino a few months ago waiting to be seated at a cash game, I had noticed an old guy had been recording the numbers in a binder for each table. He had been doing it for hours and not placed a bet, so I went over to talk to him and basically he was looking for physical biases in the wheel or a "bad wheel"

I told him I did not believe roulette was a beatable game, and he said he agreed but he wasn't out to beat the game itself. He said he was out to beat the imperfections and errors made when installing or making the wheel.

Needless to say we talked further for a days until he agreed to show me some of his numbers from a profitable wheel that he had found the year before. The spreadsheet had over 15,000 numbers entered and showed a 4-5% bias in a grouping of 3-4 numbers on one side of the wheel.

Anyways, the guy went on to say he made about 30k profit over the course of 2000 spins until he believed the wheel had been fixed or replaced.

Thoughts on this? Anyone else know anyone who is crazy enough to claim this? It's certainly something that could happen, but how often is there such imperfections?

Look up the story of Gonzalo García Pelayo and his family

Just checked it out, it's basically the same thing this guy was doing. He went on to say that in the last 3-4 months he hadn't found anything worth betting on. I asked him how many times a year he would bet and he said usually only about 2-3 times a year he puts in bets, and when he does he bets those same numbers for hours a day/week because he has an edge over the house.

It has me curious, just because it would the only way to "beat" roulette...

But wouldn't the casino have a system that tracks every wheel? Wouldn't they pick up on it as fast as you? How often does this happen?

They certainly existed in the past. Roulette bias has been a well known advantage play for more than a century now, so I was surprised to see that Pelayo was successful as recently as the 90s.

If there are biased wheels out there, they'd be in small, old casinos that haven't updated their equipment in decades. Forget about anything with a computer display of the previous numbers -- it's trivially easy for the house to check those for bias.

I guess the question is, do you want to spend your life watching roulette wheels spin and writing down numbers? Even if you do manage to find one every year and make $30,000 off it... jeez, what an awful job.

That's what I'm thinking too...

But, how often do casinos change wheels? Does the electronic display actually keep track of the last 15,000 spins or just the last 20? 30k profit just depends on what your willing to risk I guess...

I'd be interested to see if most modern casinos do track previous numbers? I'm not talking big casinos, just smaller and lesser known ones.

Modern wheels are connected to their network and every spin is recorded forever, probably with realtime statistical monitoring software. Yes they would know before you do if a wheel was biased (or being manipulated).

So basically this practice would be almost impossible now... So either the guy is full of **** or the casino is somehow careless or unaware. Add in the fact that most roulette wheels are American makes it even harder to believe.

On to my next project lol!

There are still wheels around without monitoring.

I would expect that the smaller the casino the less they can afford to hook up to the wheel.

How is your realtime statistical monitoring going to work? It would have to be something like: there's a number coming up frequently to the extent that you would expect to see a run like that one time in 300.

So, you might change it. But someone has to be looking at what the software is telling them. assessing it intelligently, and then taking effective action. This is something that happens in no corporate system anywhere.

Even if it does work, it isn't always obvious what you should do with the information. Wheel maintenance, especially downtime, has a cost. If there is a weakly biased number most of the time no one will notice: it is a waste of money getting it changed. Someone who does bet into that number is not going to break the bank. There's a limit to what the casino can do, if you get too many false positives that's a lot of screwing around for nothing.

There's an exploitable gap between optimal activity for the casino and optimal betting for the player.

Strategies such as the movable ring are only somewhat effective, biased wheel players do have methods to counter them.

Based on my experience my ex ante assumption is the casino can't/won't change anything until their hold is drastically down. Which probably means somebody can go under the radar for a long time.

With modern technology wheel bias is very very rare.

Whats not so rare is bias to dominant diamonds. Visual balistics, dominant diamond and reasonable scatter and you can sector play with reasonable success.

On the right wheel i can predict within a few pockets of where the ball is going to drop with just a watch, it's finding reliable scatter and placing the bets before NMB that gets tricky.

Mind going into more detail?! I have no clue what that is lol.

Colin, it is related to visual balistics and beating a tilted wheel.